Client in Focus: Meander Medical Center
Meander Medisch Centrum, a hospital with four different sites across the Netherlands, employs 1000 nursing staff, 200 medical specialists and 2000 other employees. Folkert Deelstra and Bert Verlinden work in the IT department at one of these locations and use TOPdesk on a daily basis.
What are your roles?
Deelstra: I am the TOPdesk system administrator and keep myself occupied with the use and setup of the application. Verlinden: As service manager, I am responsible for coordinating the IT department.
Which TOPdesk version and modules do you use?
Our department has been using TOPdesk since 1999, and now we use it in collaboration with the Purchasing team and the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory. We support four locations with the modules Incident management, Problem management, Change management and Contract management & SLM. We began using Professional, and have continued to grow with TOPdesk. After having attended Roel Spilker’s presentation at the symposium in 2005, we decided to upgrade to Enterprise. We also try to update to the newest version every time there is a release.
How many callers do you support and how large is the service desk?
We have two thousand callers, distributed across four locations. Thirty-five people work in our department, eight of whom work at the service desk.
With which aims in mind did you decide to start using TOPdesk?
The system that we used to use was expensive, impractical and unappealing. Moreover, we had to change from terminals to PCs, which involved us having to implement an entire new system. Two people from a business partner of TOPdesk happened to be installing Windows NT at the time, and referred us to TOPdesk. Both the implementation and the updates went very smoothly. Every employee who was going to be working with TOPdesk was given training, so everyone could begin using it immediately.
What is an example of a frequently occurring call?
The incidents that we get range from ‘slow computer’ and ‘request for new account’ to orders for new PCs. The Clinical Chemistry Laboratory uses Incident management to log calls about their analysis methods, while the Purchasing department creates activities for orders in Change management.
What do you like best about TOPdesk?
The best thing about TOPdesk is that nothing – complaints, requests – can ever get lost, which is something that used to happen quite often. Particularly when you want to report something as having been stolen, it is useful to know the serial number and from where the object was stolen. TOPdesk also helps prevent the time-consuming process of calling around for information. We are now always up to date on the status of a project or call.
On the TOPdesk Community, we noticed that another TOPdesk client was using an evaluation tab. We thought that this would be a good way to improve our service, and have since incorporated this system and adjusted it to suit our needs. We now have insight into the satisfaction of our callers.


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